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How you first got into Poker
Poker
It is a strange thing but the emotions that Poker can instill in people are effected very little by the amounts of money that are involved.
I have seen a player thump the table, throw his drink to the floor and storm out of a Casino, all because he has crashed out of a £10 tournament. At the same time I have seen players sit calmly waiting for their next hand to be dealt....... After losing $100,000s with a turn of a single card. So what is it that attracts us to this roller coaster ride? This game that has been described as "The Greatest Game In The World"
Poker has a mixture of elegance, aggression, raw emotion, subtlety and “slam you to the deck” shock that can be provided by no other game in the world. Name another game which you can play perfectly, make all the right decisions..... And still lose. If you want to know what gets people playing this game, then you will get a different answer for every person you ask. I can only tell you one story. Mine. After a year of playing this game I thought I would put down in words how this Roller Coaster 12 months have been for me. How it started, the highs, the lows, the things I've learned and the mistakes I've made.
A big pair
Yup, that about describes what first attracted me to poker. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. It can be argued that all events can be traced back to a single event that starts everything in motion. In chaos theory there is a very technical name for this. In the real world it is called the "Butterfly Effect". The butterfly for me was the guy who invented the TV Remote Control. That then led to the ability to change between all "three", that's all there was when I first started watching TV, channels at the touch of a button. However even though we only had three channels to choose from, that didn't stop the male psyche from developing that bastion of male control....... Channel hopping.
Channel Hopping. That most amazing of male past times. Women just don't get it. Why watch one channel for an hour when you can watch several in 30 seconds. Well that's what got me playing poker. Channel hopping. It was late on a Sunday night. I was flicking between channels; the wife had gone to bed early so I could get away with it. When I suddenly found myself looking at a rather attractive woman, leaning forward over a table. Showing a large percentage of her, not inconsiderable, cleavage to the TV camera. No it wasn't a soft "pay per view" channel that I had discovered. She was leaning forward so she could scoop up the mountain of chips that appears to have become her property. At the same time as this lovely lady was scooping the chips, two male commentators were going insane..... At first I thought they were being rather crass, and quite frankly, rude. How she had faked it with just a big pair. I mean come on guys...... How could they tell they were fake they looked plenty real to me. As I continued watching I realised that they were making reference to the cards that were lying on the table and not the amble chest that had first caught my attention. So there you have it. Every time I win a pot I thank god that it was Vanessa Russo that had won that pot and not Texas Dolly. I can assure you that Doyle's sagging face leaning across the table would not have caught my attention nearly as effectively
From that point on I was hooked. I didn't have a clue what was going on, i just knew this was one of the most exciting things I had ever seen. In the coming nights I channel hopped like a man possessed. Searching for more poker. Eventually I came across Sky Poker. Not only did this channel show you poker being played. It showed poker being played by me....... Well not literally me, but lots of other "me's". Players up and down the country were sitting at their computers playing poker and the guys on the TV we talking about it. How cool was that.
Comments
Mine was my dad started playing poker with a few friends of friends and 1 time i thought i'd go along, think i won the first game about £100 or so, i wasnt a regular for there home games until few months later and still play to this day once a month. I then found sky through my tv and played for about 3 months on freeplay tables every night and was watching the show (865) then i decided to deposit £10 which i ran up, withdrew then ran down the remaining. love the whole buzz of the game tbh
next day a pop up ad came up for a well known site. downloaded and signed up. back then the main game was Limit Hold'Em, turned my original 25$ deposit into 75$ in about an hour or so. thought this was easy. has the worst BRM in the world but it still meant I could get by without a job. after about a month or so I signed upto another site, this time with 50$ and ran that upto 8k$ in 2 days.
I so so wish that I had actually bothered with strategy back then. The games were amazing. Really amazing the amount of money I lost out on because rather than being a BR nit and grinding I played now and then, cashed out then spent it to return a week later etc.
sometimes I wish that I hadn't seen that film as I might have actually achieved something with my life.
About 3 years ago on my Facebook newsfeed I saw that one of my friends had installed Zynga poker, I'd never played the game before, either in a home game or online, but I'd heard about the poker boom and had fancied giving it a go for ages. I installed it and played on Facebook with playchips for a couple of years or so until I swtiched to real money about 15 months ago. My bankroll came from money I made selling millions of Zynga playchips on eBay (yes, people really do buy playchips). I was a late starter, coming into real money poker at the age of 43, I expected to be eaten alive and heading back to Facebook with my tail between my legs. Luckily it's gone much better than that and I've never needed to deposit again.